I have to say it's a phenomenal embarrassment for Canada at the international level and in the hallways of the United Nations. We've gone from being a proponent of human rights to appearing before various United Nations bodies looking at our own human rights performances as a kind of international human rights scofflaw.
I've been working in this area for upwards of 15 years, working on briefs and going to Geneva and New York on a couple of occasions and appearing before United Nations treaty bodies monitoring Canada's performance in terms of its obligations under the convention on women, CEDAW, the economic, social, and rights convention, the civil and political rights convention. And to a committee, they've been aghast, first of all, at our rates of poverty, just aghast that in one of the ninth-wealthiest nations in the world we have this amount of poverty among these kinds of specifically identifiable vulnerable groups. They've been aghast at the federal government's pullback from providing assurances through its spending power, or through employment insurance, ways to address that.
I was actually at CEDAW two sessions ago when the changes to the Employment Insurance Act came up and heard the government representative say they actually hadn't done a gender-based analysis, and yes, they acknowledged it made women's access to EI worse in light of the changes that are still part of the legislation.
I think it's fair to say that every time Canada goes up before an international human rights treaty body, the emphasis is on Canada's failure to follow through with its human rights obligations, particularly in the area of social and economic rights, which is what we're talking about here.